A Spin-Off novel of the popular manga and anime series Death Note, written by NisiOisiN, published in 2006.
Death Note: Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases follows FBI Agent Naomi Misora as she is enlisted by the Great Detective L to help him solve a series of perplexing and brutal murders in Los Angeles, each with a Wara Ningyo (a Japanese straw doll) left at the crime. She is soon joined in her investigation by a mysterious "unprivate" detective called Ryuzaki.
Another Note provides examples of the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Naomi is an FBI agent and a skilled martial artist.
- Aerith and Bob: Naomi and Raye are fairly normal names, Beyond Birthday appears to be self-chosen, and Rue Ryuzaki is an obvious pseudonym. But how do you explain Quarter Queen, Believe Bridesmaid, Bluesharp Babysplit, and Backyard Bottomslash?
- Alliterative Name: Rue Ryuzaki, Beyond Birthday, Believe Bridesmaid, Quarter Queen, Backyard Bottomslash, Bluesharp Babysplit, and Blackberry Brown.
- Alone with the Psycho: Naomi with Beyond Birthday. Technically, she's alone with Beyond Birthday for most of the novel.
- Bloodier and Gorier: While there are far fewer deaths here than in Death Note, the murders we do have are far more grisly.
- Calling Card: The Wara Ningyo straw dolls nailed to the walls at every crime scene but have one less appear each time.
- Caught with Your Pants Down: Sort of. Naomi walks in on BB rifling through Quarter Queen's underwear drawer, ostensibly as part of the investigation, but it looks to her like he's just being a pervert.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: B's victims are battered and mauled in various ways, but he always renders them unconscious before killing them and performs the more elaborate mutilations after they're dead, suggesting that he chooses his methods for symbolic or aesthetic reasons rather than out of a desire to cause suffering.
- Darker and Edgier: Easily the darkest story in the Death Note franchise. Despite Mello's somewhat light-hearted tone in narrating the tale, BB's murders are disturbingly horrific, even by Death Note standards.
- Detective Mole: The private detective Ryuzaki, who assists Naomi in her investigation and who the audience naturally assumes must be L, is actually B himself. He steers Naomi to recognize the clues he wants L to see and plans to use their stakeout as a setup for his final "murder" of himself.
- Determinator: B is determined to defeat L, no matter what.
- Doomed by Canon: With the exception of Near, everyone who appears or is mentioned in the story is dead by the end of the main series. Even The Narrator, Mello.
- Driven to Suicide: Beyond Birthday. (It was part of his Thanatos Gambit though.) Also A, because he could not handle the pressure of being L's successor.
- The Ending Changes Everything: Throughout the entire book, the reader thinks that Ryuzaki is L — it's specifically set up that way. At the end it is revealed that "Ryuzaki" was actually Beyond Birthday the whole time.
- Fame Through Infamy: Beyond Birthday's entire goal is to surpass L. Not by becoming the world's greatest detective, but by becoming the world's greatest criminal.
- First-Person Peripheral Narrator: Mello. At first, it looks like this trope is in play because L and Naomi were dead in the manga by the time the book came out, but Mello uses his distance from the events to deliberately obscure the twist.
- Foregone Conclusion: Readers familiar with the main Death Note series, which realistically means almost all readers, will know that Naomi and L successfully solved the LABB murder case and that both of them were murdered during the Kira investigation within a couple of years. Within the novel itself, the audience is told up-front that the killer is a man named Beyond Birthday, although the fact that he's the same person as Rue Ryuzaki is a surprise at the end.
- Fun with Acronyms: The narration notes this was invoked by Beyond's choice of location for his crimes, which is what made this the L.A.B.B. murder cases. L's After Beyond Birthday.
- Harmful to Minors: Beyond's youngest victim is the thirteen year old Quarter Queen, with her being under-aged act as part of why she was murdered despite not following the other victim's naming convention.
- Idiot Ball: All the murder victims have strange and unusual names. Anybody who learns what their names are would instantly conclude that for some reason, this killer only goes after people with weird names. Ryuzaki and Naomi never even consider this, though. In fact, they seem to be genuinely unaware that the names in question are unusual.
- I Just Want to Be You: Beyond Birthday to L. An odd case in that he also resents how he was being seen as L's "backup" back in Wammy's house.
- Irritation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: Part of why the Ryuzaki switch is so effective: Beyond has gone out of his way to mimic L's appearance and mannerisms to the point when Naomi finally meets L in person she's taken aback by how similar but off Beyond was to him.
- Lemony Narrator: Mello, who names the killer in the first paragraph, before deciding that he can't keep up the narrative tone he started with and tells the story directly, and goes on to mock the reader when they fall for the twist he set up.
- Locked Room Mystery: Deconstructed here, as it is pointed out that the killer simply having a spare key can solve the majority of cases. One of the first things Naomi notices is that a locked room is supposed to fool the investigators into thinking the death was a suicide, but the ways these three victims died (one strangled from behind and two killed by weapons not left at the scene) make it clear that they were murdered, thus begging the question of why the killer bothered with a locked room at all. It's not until she figures out the trick used to lock the room that she realizes the truth: the killer didn't want to make three homicides look like suicides... he wanted to make a suicide look like it matched the homicides.
- Murder-Suicide: Beyond Birthday is his own final victim.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: B, who is L's evil look-alike (however, it is revealed that this is not his actual appearance; B disguises himself by putting on heavy layers of makeup), a sociopathic Evil Genius Wammy's kid Serial Killer born with the Shinigami eyes.
- Noodle Incident:
- Mello has heard the stories of how L bested Eraldo Coil and Denevue, and how L arrived at Wammy's House, but chooses not to share those stories.
- The circumstances around exactly how Mello got to meet L in person and hear these stories are unexplained.
- Just what happened to the second and third generations of would-be L-successors (after A and B, but before Mello and Near).
- Posthumous Narration: This might be the case with Mello according to the prologue. It's technically possible that he composed this during the events of the manga, but it's hard to believe he'd have had the time, given the circumstances. On one hand he makes various references to people finding these "notes" and the act of writing this story, but he also makes overt references to having "lost," and talks about his own death in a very casual way that seems odd if he isn't speaking after the fact with benefits of knowing how the Kira case played out after he died.
- Prequel: It expands on the Los Angeles BB case that L mentioned casually in the original Death Note series.
- The Rival: L is this to B. (It's a bit one-sided though as L doesn't really return the sentiment.)
- Shout-Out: Akazukin Cha Cha, the favorite manga of Beyond Birthday, is a real manga and anime from the mid 1990s.
- Stalker with a Crush: Beyond Birthday's actions and desire for said actions can be seen as this towards L.
- The Stinger: The last line, which ties the story back into canon: "And a few years after his arrest, on January 21, 2004, serving a life sentence in a California prison, Beyond Birthday died of a mysterious heart attack." Any Death Note fan will recognize this as Light's work.
- Suicide, Not Murder: Beyond planned to disguise his own suicide as the last of the sequence of four murders.
- Suspect Existence Failure: Well, that was the plan, anyway. Rue Ryuzaki, a.k.a. Beyond Birthday, plans to create a case that L can't solve by committing suicide and making it look like a murder. Up until this point we're led to believe that it's L, not Beyond Birthday actually doing it.
- Sweet Tooth: Ryuzaki, much to Naomi's disgust given how he eats his jam and when she finds out exactly how much sugar he puts in tea. Or as she calls it "sweet dirt".
- Take That, Audience!: The reader is openly mocked when we find out that Rue Ryuzaki isn't actually L, but a disguised B. The narration goes on to taunt the reader, stating, "The only people who knew that were L, who Misora herself had told, and the man who had assaulted her in the alley downtown—the killer... the idea that Ryuzaki was L was comically absurd and completely unthinkable."
- Theme Initials: All of Beyond's victims share his initials, BB, except for Quarter Queen, who's meant to parallel bb by being qq due to her young age.
- Unreliable Narrator: Mello's account of the story is third-hand, which he doesn't acknowledge to the reader because it would spoil the twist that Ryuzaki is Beyond Birthday, not L. This calls into question some of the details he provides about what Naomi or Beyond Birthday were thinking or doing, since for him to know, they had to tell L and L had to tell him. It's hard to say how much of what Mello relates is his own conjecture or even L's, but he is honest enough to say upfront that his bias is towards L and that he sympathizes with but doesn't intend to praise the killer beyond his due. He's also very respectful of Naomi, and does try to preserve her professional privacy until he no longer can.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: Beyond. He's doing this to get L's attention.
- Would Hurt a Child: Beyond Birthday, as proved by his murder of a thirteen year old girl.
